Patricia Treib at John Connelly Presents

on show at John Connelly Presents in the last week of the remarkable debut exhibition of this 2006 Columbia MFA graduate (closes November 15, 625 West 27th Street, 212 337 9563).

Treib’s clean, cheery abstraction is deceptively simple in its freshness and poise. Discrete shapes are sharply individuated by painterly and chromatic means while interlocking with a seamless complexity that recalls late Juan Gris. There is a succulence and spontaneity in her touch that belies the paintings’ formal clarity. This in turn engenders a pleasingly confounding sense of how, in terms of tempo and temper alike, these images might have been constructed.